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Mental health disorders are among the leading worldwide causes of disease and long-term disability. This issue has a long and painful history of gradual de-stigmatization of patients, coinciding with humanization of therapeutic approaches. What are the current trends in Russia regarding this issue and in what ways is it similar to and different from Western countries? IQ.HSE provides an overview of this problem based on research carried out by Svetlana Kolpakova.

On September 5, Laurie Manchester, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, presented her paper on voluntary repatriation of Russians from China to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1960. The presentation was part of the research seminar, ‘Boundaries of History’, held regularly by the Department of History at HSE University in St. Petersburg. HSE News Service spoke with Laurie Manchester about her research interests, collaborating with HSE faculty members, and the latest workshop.

Dr. Sabyasachi Tripathi, from Kolkata, India, is a new research fellow at HSE University. He will be working at the Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies of the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.

In this paper we draw upon important distinctions suggested by classics of anthropology in order to develop a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of debt. Building on the opposition be-tween the logic of the gift and that of the market, we elucidate moral tensions that call debt rela-tions into being. However, instead of reducing debt to either of these rival principles, we inter-pret it as a combination of both that allows for mediating between them in a highly ambiguous moral context. Using evidence from a small Russian town, we analyse how interest-free debt functions within face-to-face interactions in local shops and how it structures the ordinary lives of shopkeepers, salespeople and consumers in the community. We discuss a moral situation that turns the fram-ing of everyday purchases into a problem and demonstrate how a material device — a debt book — enters into a transaction in order to resolve it. A debt book turns out to be a specific graphic technology, a destructive device that subverts both marketization and communitarian aid by sus-pending the framing of interaction. In the resulting atmosphere of ambiguity, debts become an object of strategic manipulation for the members of community that demands good negotiation skills and use of moral arguments. Although the constitution of debt economy is highly dependent on the dynamics of marketization and economization, it can in fact accommodate very different moral regimes.

Framing effect is one of the cognitive biases connected to effect of the wording on process of decision-making. To what degree do Russian language speakers demonstrate the effect? What kinds of sentence structures show the effect more clearly than others? Finally, what conclusions can be drawn about human cognitions based on phenomenon of the framing effect and general cognitive biases existence?

The article is a reply to M. Dodlova and M. Yudkevich. In their recent paper they undertake an attempt to use the notion of gift in the analysis of principal–agent relationship and to generalize the idea of gift in order to obtain a theory of gift exchange in the workplace. However, the analysis suggested lacks conceptual clarity and rests upon false presuppositions regarding the nature of gift. As a result, authors draw erroneous conclusions and fall victims of the magic of the gift. This short reply points to these deficiencies and suggests some ideas for alternative approaches to the analysis of certain phenomena observed in the workplace.

Modern capitalism favors values that undermine our face-to-face bonds with friends and family members. Focusing on the post-communist world, and comparing it to more 'developed' societies, this book reveals the mixed effects of capitalist culture on interpersonal relationships. While most observers blame the egoism and asocial behavior found in new free-market societies on their communist pasts, this work shows how relationships are also threatened by the profit orientations and personal ambition unleashed by economic development. Successful people in societies as diverse as China, Russia, and Eastern Germany adjust to the market economy at a social cost, relaxing their morals in order to obtain success and succumbing to increased material temptations to exploit relationships for their own financial and professional gain. The capitalist personality is internally troubled as a result of this "sellout," but these qualms subside as it devalues intimate qualitative bonds with others. This book also shows that post-communists are similarly individualized as people living in Western societies. Capitalism may indeed favor values of independence, creativity, and self-expressiveness, but it also rewards self-centeredness, consumerism, and the stripping down of morality. As is the case in the West, capitalist culture fosters an internally conflicted and self-centered personality in post-communist societies.

This volume offers a profound analysis of post-socialist economic and political transformation in the Balkans, involving deeply unequal societies and oligarchical “democracies.” The contributions deconstruct the persistent imaginary of the Balkans, pervasive among outsiders to the region, who see it as no more than a repository of ethnic conflict, corruption and violence. Providing a much needed critical examination of the Yugoslav socialist experience, the volume sheds light on the recent rebirth of radical politics in the Balkans, where new groups and movements struggle for a radically democratic vision of society.

The volume presents a new and unique view of welfare in Russia and Eastern European countries from an intersectional perspective of welfare, gender and agency. Since the collapse of socialism, the welfare structures of the post-socialist states have experienced large and rapid changes. The discussions on the reforming welfare models serve as the integrating theme for the volume. The authors discuss past and current developments and make comparisons in time and space between the early 1990s and late 2000s and between post-socialist and transitional countries. Welfare and political democratization are analyzed on the one hand as structures and processes and on the other hand as cultural meanings and through agency, which all are strongly gendered. Macro-level analyses and in-depth case studies by scholars from different countries and disciplines provide a wide and multilayered picture of welfare developments and gendered practices of social services, caregiving and civic activism, among others. Special attention is given to research methodologies, particularly on fieldwork and micro-level understanding of the related topics. The contributors come from social and political sciences and from both former socialist and 'Western' countries from Russia and Slovenia as well as the US, the UK, Germany and Finland.

The apparent realities of the communist dystopia lead to specific expectations from the transition to capitalism: the replacement of communism should cause not only a boon in human happiness, but also a resurgence of social life. Two types of observations in the past 20 years challenge these expectations. First, people from former-communist countries are often nostalgic and pessimistic when discussing changes in social relationships, friendships, family, and social engagement. Many lament the perceived decay of relationships due to a claimed growth in egoism, materialism, working hours, and moving abroad. Such stories suggest that people may have come to devalue the interpersonal social sphere during the transition years. In addition to these changes in values, there is evidence for enhanced normlessness. An example is the steep increase in murder, suicide, alcoholism, and juvenile delinquency in many post-socialist societies. However, these two observations, changing values and social disorder, have not been fully integrated, whether theoretically or empirically. As a first step toward alleviating this, the present article connects both of these changes to the reintroduction of a capitalist economic structure. Post-communist social disorder, such as deviance, can be explained if the free-market transformation weakened social values and thereby undermined the informal social control which depends on these values. This article will, in two steps, empirically investigate this proposition. First, it will ask whether the transformation to capitalist culture has resulted in individualized values that challenge informal social control. Second, this new latency of sociality will be linked to normlessness.

This research focuses on estimating the signalling role of education on the Russian labour market. Two well-known screening hypotheses are initially considered. According to first of these, education is an ideal filter of persons with low productivity: education does not increase the productivity of a person, but it does give him the possibility to signal about his innate productivity via an educational certicate. The second of these hypotheses admits that productivity actually does increase during the period of study, but nevertheless the main objective of getting an education is to acquire a signal about one's productivity. Information theory suggests that employees use education signals during the hiring processes whereby employers screen potential employees. Employers and other categories of self-employed workers are usually not screened by the labour market via their educational attainments. Comparison of the returns to education of employees vs. self-employed workers could show the difference between the returns to signals and the returns to human capital. Yet another way to understand the signals is to consider the time dynamics of the returns to education for employees staying in the same firm. This helps us to answer the question about whether the signals are valuable only during the hiring process, or whether they remain valuable during the whole experience with the firm. This research is based on the Mincerian-type earnings functions, estimated on RLMS-HSE and NOBUS data. On the basis of the available information, we cannot say that the returns to signals and human capital differ significantly in Russia. Nevertheless we can say that, for the majority of men, the return to educational signals decreases with time spent in the same firm, while we observe the opposite for women.

This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.